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hands through the static of her maniacal hair. “I just knew you’d be thrilled,” said Naomi Matthews. “I just hoped I’d be the one to tell you.”

    Naomi then bowed to herself in the mirror, accepting applause; she hurried to the door and bowed to Alice. Alice and her reflection bowed back. She bowed again after Naomi had gone, until her forehead touched the cold porcelain of the sink. She rested her face in its cold, white cave, nesting in its echoes, like Eve being surrounded by the apple’s white cave, Eve being deafened by the echoes of her deed.

Part Two

    KINGDOM C OME

    By common agreement Miami’s birthday was April sixth. Since Christmas she’d been coaxing and whining to be allowed to wear rhinestone earrings on that special day. The party was going to be big , she announced. It was going to be loud , like an eighth grader’s graduation party, although Miami was only twelve and still—and barely—in fifth grade. It was going to have boys. No it wasn’t, boys stank. Well, maybe it was. She’d see. Both possibilities were examined thoroughly by a panel of fifth-grade experts at recess every day. At home, the discussion was clipped.

    “Your party can have boys,” said Garth, who was five and didn’t like Miami’s girlfriends.

    “What’s the dif,” said Miami. “ You’re not coming to it.”

    “Why not? Where’s it gonna be?” said Garth.

    “Wherever you’re not,” said Miami.

    “I don’t get it,” said Garth. “I’m not not.”

    Miami leaned her face close to her brother’s. “You’re a little accident. Do my party a favor and banana split.”

    “Mom!” yelled Garth, from lungs that seemed to fill 90 percent of his small frame. He was unruffled and precise in his announcement. “Miami called me a little accident again.” Mrs. Shaw made a loud noise in the kitchen. By the time she appeared at the doorway she was quite calm. “Miami, did you say something to your little brother?”

    “I said ,” said Miami, working her jaw like a slide trombone, “I said it was an accident he was a boy and couldn’t come to my party.”

    “He’ll be at your party no matter what you decide, darling. He lives here. So do we. You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. They’re with you for the long haul.”

    “ That’s a laugh,” snorted Miami. “You can’t choose your family? I’m not being rude ”—she knew what her mother would say—“I’m just pointing out that you chose four children to adopt. It’s a fact.”

    But Mrs. Shaw just laughed. “I walked right into that one,” she said. “Of course there’s choice, sometimes. But there are rules, too, honey. A family is a commune. We all work together for the good of—”

    “A commune ?” Miami played at being scandalized. “Are you turning into some kind of hippie in an apron? We better get the social worker in here, pronto. I’ve never been so shocked in all my born days.” She pretended to be shocked over the tops of imaginary eyeglasses, like an old prude.

    “A commune is a perfectly good English word, and it applies to families, too,” said Mrs.
    Shaw. She sat down on the hassock with an unopened bag of frozen peas in her hands, and as she talked she worked her hands over the solid mass, separating them. It looked like calming work, and Miami wouldn’t have minded trying. But Garth meandered over and put his big old head in his mother’s lap.

    “I hope,” said Miami, with as much dignity as she could muster, “I most sincerely hope I’m not in for lecture number one hundred and fourteen: How Being a Negro Is Just As Good As Being Anyone Else. I already agree. Garth’s problem isn’t that he’s black. It’s that he’s a boy.”

    “Hee hee hee,” squealed Garth into the peas. Mrs. Shaw was tickling him.

    “I was revving up,” admitted Mrs. Shaw. “Now I’m all warmed up and have no place to go. How about number seventy-five?”

    “What’s